DELIGHTS|BOOKS The Journey Of Pearl S. Buck By George Fetherling n 1938, Pearl S. Buck, the author of The Good Earth, became the first American Iwoman to win the Nobel Prize in lit- erature. This simple statement, however, obscures what’s probably a more impor- tant one in terms of explaining her career. If you agree that T.S. Eliot, though born in the United States, was actually British, as his passport and domicile affirmed, then you can say that Buck was the first American writer of either gender to win the award without being an alcoholic. The distinction still held true at the time of her death in 1973 (and for three years after that, until Saul Bellow won the medal). Why mention this? Because it speaks to the fact that her many books — the “good” ones and all the others — arose out of her being the child of Americans who spent virtually their entire lives in China as members of the Southern Presbyterian Mission. To say the least, hers was the sort of rigidly Christian upbringing in which teetotalism was simply a given. L The S in Pearl S. Buck stood for Syden- A stricker. Her mother, Caroline Syden- TION A stricker, was a caring and determined EN R NT woman who, all her life, kept swallowing I hardships and tragedies one after other. K Buc . Pearl was born in the U.S. in 1892 but was S L taken to China while still an infant. Her fa- ar E ther, Absalom Sydenstricker, was already P a dozen years into his life’s work there: Pearl S. buck, in the 1960s, hugging one of the children helped by Pearl S. buck International evangelizing Chinese who either ignored or despised him. But he was not a man easily discouraged. He was assigned to the hands, once a head and shoulder with A number of them even “actively cam- countryside in Jiangsu (Kiangsu was the parts of an arm still attached ... They were paigned for less oppressive treatment of romanization in use back then). He made so tiny she knew they belonged to dead women.” Absalom Sydenstricker presum- only 10 converts in his first 10 years in an babies, nearly always girls suffocated or ably was not one of these, given that, area that was equal in size to Texas and strangled at birth and left out for dogs to as Ms Spurling tells us, his “distrust of had a limitless abundance “of souls who devour.” women meant that he could not bring had never heard the Gospel.” The Protestant and Catholic missions himself to believe they had souls....” The quotation is from a generally excel- set up throughout China in the latter part Pearl was two years old when the First lent new biography, Pearl Buck in China: of the 19th Century typically included Sino-Japanese War broke out: another of Journey to the Good Earth by Hilary Spurl- schools and hospitals as well as places the humiliating defeats for China that ing (Simon & Schuster, $27). The London of Christian worship. The differences characterised the 19th Century. In confu- edition (Profile, £15) goes by a different between Western and Chinese education sion, the people being invaded didn’t name — Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck’s Life were just as profound as those between maintain much distinction between the in China. The British title is a reference to Western and Chinese medicine, for the encroaching Japanese and foreigners gen- the fact that there was a cemetery behind missionaries stressed empirical knowl- erally, including westerners — especially the mission station that was Pearl’s first edge, teaching mathematics and science. westerners. This was one of the periods home. As a pre-schooler, she sometimes Some of them also led reform campaigns in his career when Absalom was attacked, “found bones lying in the grass, mutilated in such areas as flood and famine relief. beaten and threatened with execution. 46 WINTER 2011 | JAN-FEB-MAR BOOKS|DELIGHTS Once, when tied up and forced to watch of a wonderful biography of Henri Mat- the agony of one of his converts who had isse — seems confused about which side been condemned to death, his reaction was was which in the American Civil War.) envy that she would be getting to Heaven All this while, Pearl was writing essays before him. and stories about the daily lives of ordi- To his superiors, who were certainly no nary Chinese. She was one of those natu- less devout but perhaps a bit more practi- rals who wrote fluently and constantly. cal in their obsessions, Absalom was an The ultimate result, The Good Earth, “bor- incessant troublemaker. In 1896, with the rowed techniques from the Chinese novel R war ended, he was relieved of his rural E in episodic sagas covering vast territories W duties and reassigned to the bustling city LO and spanning several generations, preoc- F EE of Zhenjiang (Chinkiang). It already had B cupied less with individual characteriza- a base of 10 converts on which to build. tion than with the expressive power of a The family lived overlooking the Yangzi broad filmic vision and harsh Dickensian River in three rooms that Pearl’s mother imagery, to penetrate the deep underlife of “scrubbed with carbolic acid, all utensils Chinese people and to draw Western read- dipped in boiling water at table, all fresh ers in after her.” food either thoroughly cooked or dis- The book’s success was so all-encom- infected with potassium permanganate passing that, in retrospect, it seems a before being touched.” Even so, everyone precursor to that of Gone with the Wind but seemed to take turns with illness and dis- with more important ramifications. In this ease. Ms Spurling writes: “Absalom’s in- ESS period, Ms Spurling reminds us, need- discriminate preaching embarrassed Pearl R lessly, the West as a whole “and America CONG ... She said she could never bring Chinese F in particular, operated an unspoken cul- friends home in case he set about saving Y O tural veto against China,” a place most RAR their souls.” IB Americans still saw in terms of Fu Man- With the outbreak a few years later of L chu stereotypes. The massive novel about the Boxer Rebellion, that imperially sanc- ENTHE, the inner lives of a completely oppressed G tioned revolt against Western influence, a D and anonymous Chinese family sounded NOL reign of terror in which thousands of mis- R a new chord, particularly as its publica- sionaries and others were killed, Pearl’s A tion came at the same time as the start of father resolutely continued to allow his the Second Sino-Japanese War. Suddenly beliefs to direct his actions. In Ms Spurl- China was a hot topic in the West. It con- ing’s words: “Buoyed by the prospect of tinued to be, as the country lapsed into martyrdom himself, Absalom refused even civil war, interrupted only by the Second to consider evacuation long after most of World War when Mao Zedong’s Commu- the white population had left Zhenjiang.” nists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists In time, though, the family had to go to formed an uneasy temporary coalition Shanghai and the safety of the foreign against the Japanese, thus becoming, for military and naval forces there. It was in the moment, allies of the U.S., Britain, Shanghai that Pearl, age eight or nine, first Canada and the other anti-fascist powers: saw water come out of a tap. allies-of-convenience, one might say. Understandably, she felt herself an Pearl Buck, who never returned to outcast when she was sent back to the U.S. China after 1934, emerged as a figure of for a college education. As she later put it: great moral authority. By then she had “When I was in the Chinese world, I was come to understand how her father’s Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as religious zeal had cut him off from (the a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and author’s words) “even the most intrac- I shared their thoughts and feelings. When From the top: The Pearl S. buck birthplace table reality” of human suffering. She I was in the American world, I shut the in Hillsboro, West virginia; buck in 1932, renounced her ties to the church and door between.” To which the author adds: age 40; the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with them the Calvinist doctrines of sin, “Keeping that door closed was the price of from 1932. guilt and damnation, arriving at a brand survival for Pearl as a child, but she spent of humanitarian activism not unlike that the greater part of her life trying to open it, of Eleanor Roosevelt (who became her and keep it open.” friend). She worked hard for the rights of In 1914, Pearl Sydenstricker returned ily valuables in the garden to keep them women, African-Americans, the disabled, to China to teach. Later, she married John out of the hands of marauding soldiers and others, and for repeal of the Chinese Lossing Buck, an American economist — while remembering her mother’s sto- Exclusion Act of 1882. who became the leading foreign expert on ries of doing the same in Confederate Vir- Under strict Communism, her works Chinese agriculture. She remained there ginia when the Yankees were coming. (A were banned in China (whereas today they throughout the warlord period. At one quibble: In another place, Spurling, who is are studied there but not widely read). In point in the book, we see her burying fam- British — and also, by the way, the author post-war America, her progressive views DIPLO ma T an D I N T erna TIO na L C ana D A 47 DELIGHTS|BOOKS MM Ta NNO E C I ER A century ago, Gustaf Mannerheim and Paul Pelliot took a portait with kurmanjan Datka, the Queen of Alai, near Chigirchiq Pass.